December 12, 2006

13 comments:

Yeah right, with a cataclysmic shift of the earth's polar axis will Siberia be the earth's granary. Next these dumb Russians will be worshipping and prostrating to some near-extinct bird or animal as a means of hastening the advent of the new granary. They can take a lesson from our environmentalists who pray to the spotted owl for salvation.

Bjorn Lomborg has made the same general point many times -- that global warming, to whatever extent the trend continues and regardless of the factors contributing to it, will benefit some areas of the globe and harm others. The only thing interesting about this article is its lack of the usual, politicized hysteria on the subject of climate change. How did the editors at Reuters ever let it through?

There is a great deal of evidence -- not really in dispute at all -- that most of the planet was far better off during the Medieval Warm Period than the subsequent Little Ice Age. Brian Fagan wrote an entire book documenting both the global extent of the LII and the misery it caused in Europe and N. America. And we have yet to reach the temperatures that existed during the MWP.

None of it was even disputed until the global warming hysteria came up -- you know, right after the global cooling hysteria, errr, cooled off -- and ever since there have been attempts to ignore it. Which is precisely why the hockey stick was (or should have been) controversial from the start since it did away in a stroke with decades of research on past climate variation. Happily, the recent hearings in Washington debunked that bit of nonsense, though the spinners in the media and Big Green would have us believe otherwise.